I was listening Carly Simon’s ‘You Belong to Me’ and I got to thinking the music is kind of yacht rockish. Then I tried to think of any yr songs by female artists and came up blank.
Can you think of any? Also, why do you think there’s so few?
I’m not a huge listener of Yacht Rock, but would Pat Benatar or Heart qualify? Linda Ronstadt? Stevie Nicks?
Toni Tenille? (Of “The Captain and” fame)
Melissa Manchester?
Not Pat Benetar, not Heart, too much rock. Maybe Linda Ronstadt.
Any Fleetwood Mac song where Christine McVie sings lead.
Heart, Fleetwood Mac, and The GoGos immediately came to mind when I read the title. Basically, anything that would show up on Peter Quill’s playlist (“Cherry Bomb” might be a bit too punkish for ‘yacht rock’ but “I Love Rock ‘N Roll” seems like a canonical element of the genre as might some more power ballads of Lita Ford). I’m kind of surprised “Love Is A Battlefield” didn’t show up in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3; I had it on my list.
Stranger
Would Black Velvet by Alannah Myles count? Just trying to get a feel for what Yacht Rock really is.
Seems like Carly Simon and Carole King embody that “mellow West Coast feel” that the wiki page talks about.
I’d put some Sheryl Crow songs in that category. “I’ll I wanna Do.”
I would agree that Carly Simon does seem pretty close. I have only heard a couple of songs by her, and she doesn’t have any one song that encapsulates Yacht Rock, but between them all she does. One of the songs I have heard is Memorial Day, and most of that is not Yacht Rocky, but the disco-adjacent interludes do contain the medium-paced-yet-breezy sounds that her other songs lack, and which would complement her singing and subject matter of her other songs.
The disco interlude, as a matter of fact, reminds me a tiny bit of Glamour Profession by Steely Dan which, despite the Dan being considered questionably Yacht Rock by some, is a song which has an above average YR quotient compared to other Dan songs. The tone of the song, cynical and ironic, is the only thing that differentiates it from the rest of YR. It does have Yachty rocky music and even mentions boats.
Linda Ronstadt may not be Yacht Rock, but she is Yacht Rock-adjacent. Likewise, Carly Simon who covered Michael McDonald’s “You Belong to Me” and shared backing musicians with Steely Dan.
I always thought of Linda Ronstadt as being more “Hot Tub Rock”.
Stranger
First one I thought of too.
How about Nicolette Larson (a favorite of mine who died much too young!) or Rita Coolidge?
It helps to think of “Yacht Rock” as a radio format more than a musical genre. Further, I’d say that “is/isn’t Yacht Rock” is more meaningful as an aspect of a song or album, and less meaningful as an aspect of an artist (though if someone has done enough Yacht Rock, they’ll certainly be bucketed in YR).
On top of that, the radio format Yacht Rock typically has arbitrary temporal constraints placed on it. Singer Michael McDonald is one of the poster boys of Yacht Rock, but almost all of his 1980s solo material will commonly be excluded from a Yacht Rock-formatted program. Same with, say, Kenny Loggins. It’s not 100%, of course, because some curators will have a more expansive view of the YR format than others.
Anyway, on to female Yacht Rock artists. There aren’t very many women who are poster children for the YR format the way McDonald, Loggins, and Christopher Cross are. But of the artists mentioned in this thread so far, Simon, Ronstadt, and Tenille have many notable works that can be and are played on YR programming. I also agree upthread with Christine McVie’s lead vocals on Fleetwood Mac placing well in the YR format. Stevie Nicks is represented as well, both with Fleetwood Mac and without.
Zooming in to the individual song level, there are still more female artists represented by a song or two: Nicolette Larson’s “Lotta Love”, Karla Bonoff’s “Personally”, and Night’s “Hot Summer Nights” (female lead vox by Stevie Vann) are some examples.
Yes and yes – shame on me for forgetting Coolidge.
Okay, someone has to ask this.
What is Yacht Rock?
I’ve never heard of it.
I can hardly pronounce it three times fast.
IMHO, Rita Coolidge is sadly underrated and I wish people were more familiar wth her.
I also might include Laura Brannigan.
The YR format (like most) has fuzzy boundaries. But the Wikipedia description is very good:
Yacht rock (originally known as the West Coast sound or adult-oriented rock) is a broad music style and aesthetic commonly associated with soft rock, one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Drawing on sources such as smooth soul, smooth jazz, R&B, and disco, common stylistic traits include high-quality production, clean vocals, and a focus on light, catchy melodies. The term yacht rock was coined in 2005 by the makers of the online comedy video series Yacht Rock, who connected the music with the popular Southern Californian leisure activity of boating.
It’s important to note that (1) the term “yacht rock” was originally something of a joke, and (2) this format was never called “yacht rock” back in the day. Translated into 1980s radio-format terminology, what we call “yacht rock” today was a subset of “soft rock”.
Karla Bonoff… so many of Linda Ronstadt’s softer hits were Karla’s work.
In case anyone disputes my choice, may I point out that I’ve seen Karla twice, playing with Andrew Gold and Livingston Taylor, two soft-rock alumni?
And when you spend an afternoon at the Woodland Park Zoo on a picnic blanket watching happy families stroll by, the artist playing is almost automatically yacht-worthy.